CFP chair’s Ohio State, Indiana explanation may not sit well in Columbus

The Ohio State Buckeyes went to Bloomington on Oct. 17 and beat the Indiana Hoosiers, losing their starting quarterback along the way and still closing out the game. When the College Football Playoff selection committee released its first rankings Tuesday night, Indiana was No. 4 with a first-round bye and Ohio State was No. 12 and outside the bracket.

That eight-spot gap is the complaint in Columbus, and the committee’s own explanation made it worse. Asked about the two teams, chair Hunter Yurachek said the group had not lined them up against each other.

“We never got to a point where we were comparing Indiana and Ohio State in their head-to-head,” Yurachek said.

How can a win over the No. 4 team not count?

Yurachek’s rule is that teams must share an evaluation group, or pod, before a head-to-head result comes into play. The committee also decides who goes in each pod. So a team can beat a contender on the road and never see the win applied, simply because the people doing the sorting already put the two far apart. Fans would call that circular, and they would be right.

On ESPN, Greg McElroy argued that Ohio State looked penalized for playing a hard schedule. The Buckeyes’ two losses came by a point against the No. 7 Texas Longhorns and at the No. 20 USC Trojans, and their wins over Indiana and the No. 19 Iowa Hawkeyes give them two more ranked victories than the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, who sit one spot higher and make the field.

The committee has heard this complaint before.

Last December, it did not place the Miami Hurricanes next to Notre Dame until the final rankings, despite Miami’s head-to-head win, and Yurachek traced that to where the Hurricanes had started.

“Rece, if you recall, Miami was a loser of two of three when they entered [the first set of rankings on Nov. 4] at No. 18,” Yurachek said.

The same chair is now using the same reasoning a year later, and the same complaint is coming back with a different team attached.

Is Ohio State being punished for Julian Sayin’s injury?

That idea drew some of the sharpest anger of the night. Sayin is out indefinitely with a throwing-arm injury, and the suggestion that the committee factored it in brought a blunt reply from the RedditCFB account on X.

“This is by far the stupidest thing the CFP does and the rule should be amended,” RedditCFB wrote.

The ESPN has mentioned that the Committee may be factoring in Julian Sayin’s injury in Ohio State’s ranking. This is by far the stupidest thing the CFP does and the rule should be amended. There’s no other sport that considers player injuries to keep teams out of the postseason and it’s terrible for player safety.

— RedditCFB (@RedditCFB) November 4, 2026

Yurachek gave the suspicion some fuel on ESPN and then pointed somewhere else.

“They didn’t look like the same Ohio State team this past weekend against Southern Cal,” Yurachek said.

“I don’t want the burden all on the freshman quarterback. Their offense played fairly well. They were held to four field goals through three-and-a-half quarters, but their defense gave up some really big, explosive plays,” Yurachek said on ESPN

The inconvenient part for Buckeyes fans is that their own coach does not sound much happier than the committee. The 30-18 loss at USC came against a team that had just lost 24-7 to the unranked Wisconsin Badgers, and Ryan Day did not spend the week defending it.

“I would’ve said coming into the game that we were very close. I didn’t feel that way coming out of the game. Just being dead honest. The penalties are ridiculous. The mistakes are ridiculous. That leads me to believe that we’re not where we need to be. We have an opportunity against Oregon now to go turn that around,” Day said.

Ohio State can be right about Indiana and still be a team with real problems heading into Saturday’s 3:30 p.m. ET game against the No. 23 Oregon Ducks. One more loss would likely end the argument, along with the Buckeyes’ at-large hopes.

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